Making the best better


RESEARCH ON A UNIQUE, pupil-centred educational initiative, ‘Be the Best You Can Be’, has resulted in a series of recommendations to enrich and modify the programme. The programme was developed by Dr David Hemery CBE and his colleagues in response to the desire for a legacy of the 2012 London Olympic Games that would inspire the nation’s children. Designed to facilitate pupil awareness and responsibility, the programme will be integrated into the National Curriculum. Research in ten schools showed that the


programme in its existing form did not lead to expected improvements for pupils. Based on the study, researchers made a range of suggestions to enhance the programme ranging from clearer aims to best-practice guidelines for programme delivery. n


i Contact Dr Martyn Standage, University of Bath


Email m.standage@bath.ac.uk Telephone 01225 383087 ESRC Grant Number RES-177-25-0011 - An ESRC Venture


Dependable innovation


TODAY, MORE THAN ever, it’s no longer sufficient for products and technologies to be innovative; they also have to be dependable – reliable, available, safe and secure. But, says researcher Dr Luciana D’Adderio, “there’s mounting evidence to suggest that managing Dependable Innovation will become one of the great challenges of the 21st century”. Technologies that fail lead to annoyance, disruption and, in some catastrophic cases, injury and loss of life. To avoid this, firms devote considerable economic and organisational resources to validating their products and services. “Unfortunately, simply allocating resources is no longer sufficient to ensure that innovations are also dependable, as the challenges to validation and testing have escalated significantly,” says Dr D’Adderio. Due to the growing complexity of technology, specialisation and the globalisation of productive knowledge and activities, firms are struggling to validate innovative products whose design, production and maintenance


are distributed across increasingly extended inter-organisational networks.


“Our research finds that the shift from the tightly-integrated multi- divisional corporation to the loosely- coupled modular network organisation holds important consequences for the dependability of organisational processes and their outcomes, especially in fast-changing, high innovation environments,” says Dr D’Adderio. “Specifically, these include difficulties in co-ordinating and controlling knowledge and processes that are dispersed across a diverse range of organisational functional, cultural and geographical boundaries. Today’s firms are therefore presented with harsh challenges that bear directly upon their competitiveness and viability.” n


i Contact Dr Luciana D’Adderio,


University of Edinburgh Email l.d.adderio@ed.ac.uk Telephone 0131 650 2454 ESRC Grant Number RES-331-27-0014 - AIM Research Fellowship


CLIMATE TARGETS The Climate Change Act (2008) places a legal requirement on the UK government to set targets and report on progress on climate emission reductions. This new study examines whether and how governance structures make a difference to policy effectiveness and accountability within the field of carbon emissions management and the transport sector. ESRC grant number ES/J007439/1 - An ESRC Venture


TACKLING INEQUALITY Progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on maternal and newborn health in Asia and Africa has been uneven. Effective interventions rarely reach those who need them most. New research will explore how to address the exclusion of poor and otherwise marginalised groups from efforts to achieve the MDGs and how to reduce socio-economic inequalities in maternal and newborn mortality. ESRC grant number RES-167-25-0682 - ESRC/DFID Joint Scheme


VENTURING ACTIVITY Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) is the practice of non- financial firms making equity investments in entrepreneurial companies. A new study of the UK pharmaceutical sector will use both firm- and industry- level analysis to give a broad perspective on CVC activity, examine the impact of CVC on the performance of the whole economy and the effect of CVC on industrial structure. ESRC grant number PTA-026-27-2859 - Post Doctoral Fellowship


SUMMER 2011 SOCIETY NOW 9 AUTUMN 2011


IN BRIEF


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